Soft Inheritance

In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet's rapidly evolving reality where "kindness is a scar," though "not all scar-makers are kind.,"" Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of ""after"--post-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-death--these poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life.

Fawn Parker is a Giller-nominated author of five books including the forthcoming Hi, it's me (McClelland & Stewart 2024). Her story "Feed Machine" was nominated for the 2020 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and her story "Wunderhorse II" was anthologized in André Forget's After Realism, (Véhicule, 2022). Fawn is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick and her work is represented by Ron Eckel at CookeMcDermid Agency.